Just me, DavoGrande, 6'4' and 285 pounds of love, compassion, honor, decency and humility (stop laughing!), bound together by a framework of principle, mainly the Commandments... so far the scientist/leftists have failed to convince me that there is no God and that He didn't create me... :-)

Note that it makes much more money overseas than it does in the States, even though in the main it will lose money.

Dems often ask "why do they hate us?"

It's rhetorical, of course... Dems believe they know why we are hated, that it's because of Bush and aggression and imperialism and commercialism and all the things leftists have always hated about America.

So what do they do about the fact that we are 'hated'? They send off these movies from Hollywood that CONVINCE the other people of the world that we SHOULD be hated.

These movies play straight into the heart of anti-Americanism; they set the scene with premises that aren't accurate, then they portray Americans as underhanded and greedy and arrogant.

Except, of course, for the Noble College Professor Trying to Change the World, played by Robert Redford.

The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition, and doubtless some others still in the pipeline, all are films which do NOT accurately represent what America is doing, but DO overstate and mislead audiences to buy into anti-Americanism... and when the audience is in France or Turkey or Indonesia, they're READY to believe this junk. And they'll plunk down a few bucks to indulge themselves in confirmation-entertainment.

The article says the only big overseas markets that haven't seen the movie yet are Japan and Italy. It also says the overseas haul is considerably larger than the domestic tally.

This means the markets that serve Islam have already had the chance to see this movie, which explains why the overseas box office is bigger.

Many a young muslim man has seen or will see this and other anti-American and anti-war movies. The movies will confirm in his mind that his opinion is the valid one, the opinion of superior people like movie stars, and perhaps the solidifying of this opinion will also firm up his commitment.

And he will kill on that commitment.

These movies cause deaths of innocents. Common sense says so. The producers and the stars cannot help but understand this.

They claim that our actions cause terrorism to increase, but don't THEIR actions have a little something to do with it?

Osama bin Laden has made a new audiotape, a speech to Europeans, practically begging them to recover the former vigor of their opposition to Bush.

And it isn't just the new tape you've heard about in the news.... bin Laden has a new video circulating in which he proudly claims sole credit for the attacks of 9/11, saying we did it, I'm responsible, I kill their innocents, yada yada.

Note to Troofers-- Unless Osama bin Laden has large ballistic missiles and knows how to carefully demolish buildings, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were hit by airplanes piloted by al Qaeda members.

Note to anti-Semites like Michael Scheuer-- the Jews DIDN'T do it.

Note to BDS sufferers-- BUSH DIDN'T DO IT.

Bin Laden did it.

Unless, of course, you believe he is part of a conspiracy to make us believe he did it, to take the pressure off the Jews and Bush.

Now that we know at least eight of the questioners on the CNN YouTube Republican primary debate this week were historically hostile to Republicans, Democrat activists or actual Democrat campaign operatives, we wonder how well CNN prepared for this.

In other words, is this an example of media bias or media incompetence? Either is disastrous for CNN and the MSM in general, whose primary defense against the rise of the blogger is that "we are professionals and we check our facts", while bloggers are nerds in their pajamas blogging in their living rooms.

If this is an example of carefully prepared programming, CNN is an arm of the Democrat party.

If it is an example of unprepared programming, CNN might as well send out a memo to all employees to put on their pajamas and stay in their living rooms.

Here is an interview with David Bohrman, Washington bureau chief for CNN and the executive producer of this debate. It appeared on the New York Times website prior to the debate, and in it Bohrman specifically says they are addressing and removing potential Democrat questioners trying to worm their way in and embarrass Republican primary candidates:

“There are quite a few things you might describe as Democratic ‘gotchas,’ and we are weeding those out,” Mr. Bohrman said. CNN wants to ensure that next Wednesday’s Republican event is “a debate of their party.”

Clearly CNN wanted the public to know that it was well aware that this was happening and was vetting videos with this in mind.

I submit, Milud, that CNN is NOT guilty of incompetence and IS guilty of agenda journalism of a nature so obvious and shocking that-- aw, never mind.

It's not shocking. Its just another nail in the coffin lid that is slamming shut on the MSM, briskly whipping off their phony veil of 'factual neutrality'.

Reporters and journalists are now trusted less by the general public than used car dealers. This is yet another manifestation of the reason.

The New York Times' stock shares are worth less than half of what they were a few years ago, and have recently been downgraded by a major brokerage house-- to SELL.

Readership of major papers diminishes on average between 5 and 10% a year, while the American population count continues to rise.

Fox News continues to massacre all the other cable news networks, and major network news audiences continue to diminish.

And Dan Rather still believes the documents were real and the story was true. No kidding.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

A comment appeared below this post purporting to be from Bob Moffitt, a PR guy for the Minnesota state American Lung Association organisation. He takes umbrage at the assertions in the article I examined here, that the ALA is concerned about a particular pollutant from the burning of gasoline and ethanol together.

For more on Mr. Moffitt and his relationship to the ALA of the upper midwest and/or the ALA in general, look here-

all is not, as usual, what it seems. :-)) Moffitt does not actually say the WSJ's assertion about the ALA is inaccurate, only that his organisation is not a critic of biofuels (a point the WSJ didn't actually make). He says the ALA recognizes that 'alternative fuels can play an important role in the reduction of fossil fuel use' and that 'they can vary widely on their impact on lung health because of their composition and application'.

For enlightenment on that first part, just read the WSJ article itself. As to the second part, it supports rather than opposes the WSJ's assertion about what the ALA said. In the end, I'm not sure why Mr. Moffitt bothered to post here.

Like I said in this original post, the energy problem is essentially leftism, not energy. A guy from Minnesota (a state experiencing paroxysms of silly leftism at present) showing up here for disputation sort of illustrates my point.

Meanwhile, on with my original post, whose content I am not the least bit convinced by Mr. Moffitt to alter:

**************************************Ethanol, from panacea to pariah in one year.

"Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both main street and wall street"

In the span of one growing season, the Journal says ethanol critics complain it pushes up food prices, has questionable green bona fides and that it doesn't reduce the need for oil nearly as much as its proponents said it would.

Even the American Lung Association has gotten into the act, expressing concern about a certain air pollutant arising from the burning of a mix of ethanol and gasoline. And an outside expert working for the UN has said that the food price inflation resulting from using food as fuel is a 'crime against humanity' because of the burden on the poor.

Remember the tortilla riots down south, last year? The price of corn tortillas had tripled in a short time, and folks were understandably upset.

And the National Academy of Sciences says the business of corn crops for ethanol could strain water supplies for irrigation.

Naturally, America is the biggest producer of ethanol and has the most to lose in the form of futures investments, stock prices of related companies, etc. Whole communities in farming areas are now economically based on ethanol production through their crops.

There's a lot to lose when the fairy tale ends, when the unreality of political correctness comes home to roost in the form of painful economic REALITY.

The fact is, there is only one economically VIABLE substitute for oil at this time in the history of the planet, and that's NUCLEAR power.

But leftists won't let us build new plants. Even though there's only been one accident in the past thirty years, and it was in Russia, at a plant which was built with old technology even then.

Many nuclear plants, even those with that old technology, still soldier on around the world, working well, providing clean safe electricity to power those future electric cars we're all supposed to be driving.. and imagine how much better the NEW plants would be, with new efficient technologies and new computerized redundant safety systems.... and yet, we can't build new plants.

Nor can we drill in Alaska, or off the coast of Florida, or in California.... the leftists complain about high gas prices but will NOT address the supply issue that causes them.

Heck, they won't even let us build new REFINERIES, even though these have as much to do with gas supply crunches and sudden pump price increases as the supply of oil does....

It's clear to me, given the new acknowledgement of ethanol's miserable failure (which I predicted last year), that the chief obstacle to America-- and the world-- having all the safe, low priced power it wants is... LEFTISTS.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I've often said, when conversations are steered to evil Big Oil, that they aren't so much oil companies as ENERGY companies, and oil is the most economic form of energy at present... so they produce oil...

But in opposition to liberals who want to tax us so government can research alternative energy, I've always said that big oil companies are already doing that research, more efficiently than government, WITHOUT taxing people.. because energy companies want to sell you energy 20 years from now just like they do today...

Conspiracy theorists and leftists (redundancy?) want to believe that EEEeevillll big oil is somehow covering up alternative energy possibilities so they can keep making money on oil.. but actually, they're doing the research and trying to DISCOVER opportunities, so that when profit is made, it goes to THEM.

The American Way. Let 'em do it. And if new and different ways of powering this world are not yet economically feasible, trust the people with the most at stake to be ahead of the game and ready with the new products. ExxonMobil wants to sell you energy even when it isn't oil anymore. That's how they'll stay in business when the oil's gone.

I just finished "Lone Survivor" by Marcus Luttrell, the one man who came back from the gut-wrenching loss of Seal Team 10 in Afghanistan two years ago.

There are no words to describe the intensity of this story; every one of those men deserves a medal of honor in my view, not least Luttrell, who fought and killed many of the enemy while wounded and dying of thirst himself; with help from locals who had integrity and knew good from evil, he returned to his family, 'came back from the dead'....

He'd been shot, he'd fallen off a mountain more than once, he'd been beaten by terrorists while lying wounded, and he'd endured watching the deaths of all of his closest friends.

Now, two years later, he's gone back on active duty with the Seals. He had fractured vertebrae and a broken wrist, among other injuries. He admits he's not as tough as he was before the injuries, but he's still tough enough. He insists on keeping to his contract with the Navy, even though President Bush himself would have let him out of it.

I wept like a schoolgirl reading this thing. (not intended as an offense to schoolgirls)

I immediately wanted to know if it had been purchased by any studios to make a movie of it.

And it has, just in the last month, come out of a bidding war with studios. It was not optioned, it was bought outright. And in that bidding war, Spielberg lost. Universal Studios got it.

That's how big this is going to be.

Is this the first PRO American, pro Iraq war movie? Will there be leftist overtones? Will they cast Cruise or Penn or Robbins or any well known leftists as Seal team members?

Will Michael Moore be cast as an Afghan mountainside?

Peter Berg will direct. He did "The Kingdom" and worked with real Seals on set, and apparently he bonded with Luttrell when they visited.

On the surface, it's obvious to sensible people why the anti-war movies of these past couple of years are failing so miserably.

It's because most people don't share the sentiments expressed by them. Most people don't believe our troops are evil or morally compromised, and most people understand the Islamist terrorists ARE evil and need to be fought. Hollywood is just plain wrong on their premises, and to be attractive as a story, a movie must be a story that can be morally understood by ordinary people.

But this issue is more complex than it might seem, and there's nobody better to unravel the complexity than a former Hollywood denizen, a screenwriter, one of THEM...

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

UPDATE: This story says it all-- note down in the middle, where the writer implies that poverty and minority status are the causes of the anger. That argument is SO over, SO 1970's.

IT'S THE ISLAMISTS, STUPID.

*************************************************

Just like two summers ago, an incident that was unavoidable has been turned into a cause for rioting by 'youths' whose appearance, culture, race, and even skin color, are seldom mentioned in the press.

Apparently two boys on a small (illegally small, in fact) motorcycle ran it into a police car, and they both died.

Now Michelle Malkin has the latest, including a rare sighting of an accurate description of the 'youths' in the press. Rest assured it won't happen again. :-)

One young man exclaims "this is war... we want at least two policemen dead"....

I have news for him; if it was war, he would be running from soldiers shooting at him. It isn't war, it's simple violence and thuggery from him and his 'youth' friends.

And it's part of a long term plan among radical Muslims to cow Europeans into accepting their increasingly important place in Euro society, culminating a generation from now in Islamic numerical supremacy and Islamic government.

One man, one vote, once. When Islamists are in the majority, they'll be elected into control of local and national governments, and then elections will cease and Imams will rule.

The more scenes of violence, flames and destruction we see, the closer it all seems.

Hmm... certain creatures mutate in ways that are not beneficial to their species, and as a result the mutation is snuffed out when the creatures die. They can't compete in nature, they are sub-par, they are overwhelmed by better qualified and more capable creatures.

The young lady who had herself sterilized to save the planet had felt strongly about doing this from a young age, and tells of her dismay when the first doc she consulted said she shouldn't do it because she might change her mind--

"I found it insulting that she thought that, just because I was a woman, I'd reach a point where an urge to breed would overcome all rational thought."

Um, yeah... I'm not sure 'rational thought' is the first description that springs to a reader's mind here... but hey, at least that's one less poor stressed kid who has to grow up with a leftist envirowacko mom... :-)

As I am the editor in chief (as well as the entire staff of journalists and the E-paper boy) here at DavoGrande, I can and do write what I want. :-)

I've been participating in a discussion about Mike Huckabee with a small group of emailers, and took the position that Huckabee was uncomfortably liberal in his view of how tax dollars should be used to 'help the needy'. I made the point that charity and government programs are not only not the same thing, but can be considered opposites, in that charity springs from the good will and volunteerism of the individual, while taxpayer funds for programs fail the 'charity' test; they do not spring from the good will of the taxpayer. Often the taxpayer is specifically against the program on which his money is spent, and thus it is uncomfortably like stealing, taking from him against his will for purposes of which he knows nothing or else to which he is opposed.

An emailer responded that the sort of thing I'm talking about sounds like real Christianity, and cited a couple of Biblical stories to show that Jesus was against capitalism and private property; he pointed at Jesus' words to rich people, eye of the needle, sell everything and give the money to the poor, etc.

I responded heartily, and will reproduce that here in case you're interested--

This is simply not true. Jesus did not issue a proclamation that Christians shouldn't own anything or earn anything. This biz of the eye of the needle and the rich man's difficulty going to heaven or being perfect were LESSONS, about the weakness and sinfulness of individuals, about how easy it is to rely on other things instead of God.

His whole point was that human beings (even the 'best' of them, by any measure) cannot be perfect and cannot earn their way to God's kingdom. He was preparing people, remember, to understand His future death on the cross. He needed to teach them that they simply COULD NOT be perfect, so they'd know exactly what He accomplished when He died on the cross.

This is Christian central station here. It's what Christianity IS.

Christianity is not monastic ascetiscism or communism. It is simply rearranging of human priorities, making God the most important thing in your life instead of wealth or happiness or other such temporary things, can't take it with you, yada yada.

And He was right, it is damn hard to quit relying on things and start relying on God. That's probably why so often we see people who go from something to nothing, to the bottom of their barrel, and then declare they're born again. Chuck Colson is a great example, a hotshot Washington guy who had it all, then went down in flames at Watergate and came out of prison a born again guy who has done nothing but good works in prison ministry ever since. There are lots of phony celebrity come-to-Jesus events, but the many real such events seldom attract attention.

Rich people make great Christians, and I know some, multimillionaires who donate millions to good causes and don't ask for props. That's real Christianity, giving it away in God's name, and it happens a lot.

Jesus only meant that being rich carries its own set of temptations and difficulties, not that one couldn't be rich and still be a Christian. To be a good steward, to make money and to make your money make money, is good-- provided you live by basic principles and you give a lot away. It's the hoarders and the venal and the corrupt and the competitive He's talking to, and of course to those tendencies in all of us.

The rich guy who walked away sad? The guy was asking what he had to do to be perfect, and claiming he had done it all already. Jesus gave him one more test of faith, to give away everything he has and follow Him, and the guy couldn't do it. The lesson was as much to the crowd as to the guy-- see, no matter how hard you try to be perfect, there's always the thing that holds you back. NOBODY'S PERFECT.

Not that rich guys are automatically failed Christians, but that they are held back by their love of money. It's the LOVE of money He's saying we have to overcome, not the HAVING of it. How can you be generous in the name of Jesus if you are ascetic in the name of Jesus?

It is obvious that there is selectivity in the media, a choice as to which stories they believe will draw the most attention and thus the highest ratings on which to base their ad sales.

And that's ugly... because whether their assumptions are accurate or not, their conclusion is that we the vast red state viewing audience prefer to agonize over missing blonde princesses rather than women, or men, of other races or looks or ages.

They DO get good ratings on those shows, but 'good ratings' is a subjective thing, and it really isn't that many people. A million people watching a show is a big deal in the world of cable, and that means for every American watching, there are 299 with better things to do. And they don't often even get a million on those 'missing white woman' shows.

But for myself, I don't think that's the primary reason the MSM avoids stories on missing black women.

I believe the reason we don't see stories about the Latasha Normans of the world is because someone somewhere in the decision-making structure of our media is afraid that the person responsible for the missing black woman is a black MAN, and thus they might be forced to air lots of shocking stories on the evil and bestial nature of an African American male.

He, of course, is their preferred VICTIM, not the guilty party (remember Tookie?). It goes against the liberal press agenda.

And once again the party of compassion shows that, at its heart, it doesn't give a damn about actual people, even the ones it is supposed to be defending from the evil conservatives (yes, I picked on Greta for the title of this post-- Fox isn't a 'conservative' channel, merely a less liberal one, and Greta's been around longer than Fox News has, and was on CNN doing the same thing she does now).

I would think that one of the areas of responsibility the media would accept and welcome would be the responsibility to help solve crimes and rescue people in danger. I would think that there would be entire cable channels devoted to this, that media companies would be willing to LOSE MONEY to perform this vital function of spreading information in order to help find good conclusions for matters such as these.

I know from my 27 years of radio broadcasting that informing the public was (probably still is) considered mandatory for radio stations. The FCC required us to do a nominal amount of that in order to retain licenses. And what is an Amber Alert if not a recognition that broadcasting requires attention to the immediate needs of the public?

I wonder if they'll find her body, catch and imprison the killer, sigh sadly, and name some new alert after Latasha Norman. Too late to help save her. But Natalie Holloway, who's been dead for many months, still gets the face time on TV.

Tax law cannot be altered without real world consequences. Every time you alter taxes, you affect the activity you're taxing, even if the target (in this case big oil) seems to have unlimited money.

If you lower taxes, the activity increases, which explains why our government revenues in this country have set new records each of the past several years. The Bush tax cuts have fueled an uproariously good economy, and more business means more taxes collected, even at lower rates.

One thing is for sure; even if the people you're trying to tax actually have the money (and in this case they do, for now), you can rest assured they won't just hand it over without a fight.

This reminds me of the 1993 (or was it 1992?) congressional bright idea of a 10% tax on luxury yachts. 10% on top of the price of a million dollar yacht? SURE. Those rich guys can afford this. They won't even blink! Easy money.

Within a couple of years the builders of luxury yachts were going out of business for lack of sales, and hundreds (or thousands) of ordinary fiberglass workers and electricians and carpenters and painters were going home unemployed, adding to government (taxpayer) expense of unemployment payments.

Meanwhile the USED luxury yacht market, which had NOT been taxed this way, was flourishing, and yacht brokers were making as much money as ever while rich people were buying as many luxury yachts as ever; it was only the regular guy, the worker, who got hammered, and the government collected almost NO MONEY and had to pay out MORE money on unemployment.

Tax a behavior and you reduce it.

Even the big oil companies trying to produce oil in Alaska will walk away when the state government tries to hike their taxes arbitrarily-- because hey, they can afford it, they're big oil, they won't even blink, easy money, heh heh...

My guess is, the state government has already decided where to spend the money, and now they're going to be hard pressed to find it somewhere else.

What's next, a government diktat forcing companies to do business in your state? Will they declare the closing of a business to be tantamount to nonpayment of future taxes and use the law to force businesses to keep doing business?

Don't laugh-- I was in Brussels for several years, and a big British clothier named Marks and Spencer had a store there, and one (or several) in France. (I liked Marks and Spencer, because they sold pants that fit me.)

One day I read in the paper that they were closing their Belgian and French stores for lack of business, because they were losing money-- and the French government responded by passing a law FORBIDDING BUSINESSES TO CLOSE UP SHOP WITHOUT GOVERNMENT PERMISSION.

You can be sure that corporate slavery will be quickly followed by individual slavery.

Fortunately the French have had a mass vision of the error of their ways, and are in the painful process of correction from socialism.

I hope we don't go down that road and pass them going back the other way.

While the words of His A$$H0LINE$$ the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams are still irritating me, here's more on the American Non-Empire by Captain Ed over at Captains Quarters, with help from Jonah Goldberg .

I am not the least bit surprised at his comments, but perhaps a bit surprising is that they appear in an interview he gave to a Muslim magazine.

Note the part about what the beneficent British did in India, which he gave as a comparison to what we are doing in Iraq ("quick burst of violent action to clear the decks then move on and let someone else clean it up" is what he says).

Now lets talk FACTS--

First, the British were FORCED to partition India because of the Muslim rioting and violence. Pakistan exists because Muslims rioted it into existence, not because the British were wise and patient caretakers of India. That's a load of crap. They did the expedient thing on their way out the door, to keep the fighting down.

Second, Mr. Bean here seems to have no idea that we've been in Iraq for years building schools and giving vaccinations and building civic infrastructure and saving lives on multiple levels, exactly the kind of loving attention and expenditure of resources he accuses us of NOT making.

I realize it wouldn't help him to read the papers, since those things do not appear in them, but still, His Holiness the Starch Bishop could have a BIT better command of fact before he launches.

Don't forget, too, that the Brits were still in Empire mode during the India partition, having been in India for a very very long time for the sake of spices and tea and resources and glory. They get NO points in today's leftist interpretation of world affairs, because they were EVIL IMPERIALISTS.

Whereas we the Americans are not attempting to procure any territory for any purpose, and the Arch Nemesis even agrees with that in his article, clumsily accusing us of attempting to build an empire of power and influence instead of territory so he can still call us evil imperialists.

All of this is well known fact, and should be treated as such by a well-educated Brit such as our Jerry Garcia lookalike here... but he throws the facts under the double-decker bus and goes with leftist propaganda instead.

As someone said (Mitt I think), this will make you glad the founding fathers wrote an amendment forbidding us from having an official state church. It's not working so well over there in Jolly Olde England.

HT Hugh Hewitt for linking me to this pathetic Dhimmi interview. The fact that it is published in a Muslim magazine proves that the Starch Bishop is literally whining with upturned hands to Muslims "Don't attack ME, I'm on YOUR side, it's the Yanks you hate, not me!" He's buying protection for his church and his person, working to keep his head in these trying times...

A thoroughly disgusting display. If he really believes these things, he's stupid and malevolent. If he does not believe them and is saying them for political effect (not least to make his person safer from attack), he's a Machiavellian weasel. Meanwhile this interview will take its place amongst the lore of the West that is known in Muslim lands, alongside "Redacted" and the many other anti-war movies that get no audience in America but which will make the rounds back east and inflame the Muslims even more. Our Arch-leftist is thus contributing to the violence he deplores, by inflaming young men with lies so that they go and kill, and likely they will try to kill US. Thanks for nothing, Mr. Bean. Blood on your collective hands, you leftist lot.

If he were a real Christian, he'd be speaking of the virtues of the Christian faith in a Muslim magazine, not trashing the United States with fact-free leftist propaganda. Christ calls us to share the good news of His coming, not to be sucking up to Muslims by trashing the American evangelical Christian tradition.

But to Rowan Atkinson over there, we are the worst imperialists in the world.

He might as well gain a couple of hundred pounds and start walking around with a movie camera and a microphone.

Regarding the below post about Chavez' use of the word 'traitor' to describe anyone opposed to his leadership--

The word 'fascist' originates in the Latin word "fascia", or bundle of reeds.

In the Roman era, a leader carried an axe and a fascia (actually his slaves carried them before him), the symbols of two things--

axe = power of life and death over citizens

fascia = UNITY of citizens

The fascia, the bundle of reeds, symbolized a society of citizens all facing in the same direction, and exemplified the strength of unity through the fact that an individual reed could easily be broken but a BUNDLE was as strong as timber.

"Uggo" Chavez is busily building a fascist society. In his view all citizens should be facing the same direction, supporting the same things, opposing the same things, and any who do not are threatening the strength of the nation and must be dealt with. A 'loyal opposition', the heart of democratic ideals, is considered impossible under a fascist regime.

THIS IS FASCISM. When an American leftist is free to appear on sixteen TV shows and write and sell books and spread himself all over the web with blogs, he makes a FOOL of himself by complaining that he lives in a fascist state!

If it WERE a fascist state, he would already be in PRISON! NOBODY WOULD HEAR HIS VOICE!

And no TV stations would be on the air broadcasting his opposition to Bush.

In Venezuela, Chavez has stopped the broadcasting by TV stations who opposed him. Now he darkly threatens individual citizens who might want to vote against his 'reform package' by calling them traitors-- implying they will face the justice of the 'state' in response to their treachery.

It is a Venezuelan's last chance to avoid appearing on a list of enemies. Vote right, or pay the price.

I ask again of American leftists, where are the Bush mass graves full of the corpses of journalists and MoveOn.Org members who have opposed the mighty fascist dictator Bush?

If you want to understand fascism in the 20th century, look to Mussolini; he used much of the imagery of the Romans in his dictatorship, including a youth club to raise young men to be good citizens, called Juventus, the same name as the same organization in ancient Rome.

IN the olden golden days, a traitor was defined as one who fought for the enemy against his own country or one who aided or gave comfort to the enemy.

We don't use the word 'traitor' or 'treason' these days, mostly because about half our politicians and almost all our journalists could be defined as having given aid and comfort to the enemy.

Heck, even our movie producers are doing that. All those new anti-war movies coming out of Hollywood, the ones nobody in this country is watching, will all be widely viewed in Islamic countries as proof of our perfidy and evil. Brian de Palma can't even get his dreadful 'Redacted' movie anywhere near $100,000 in its first weekend (and his financier, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, will lose some bucks on this one), but I guarantee it will make millions overseas. Perhaps Cuban and de Palma knew this and were betting on it.

If so, that makes the owner of the Dallas Mavericks a traitor to his country. Seriously. A hundred years ago he'd have been hanged.

And of course many a nation in this world still executes traitors, albeit not many Western nations.

Chavez has publicly stated that anyone who votes against his reforms is a traitor. That means 'enemy of the state' of Venezuela. He's declaring that opposition to him is equivalent to joining in war against the nation.

By implication he is threatening to execute those who oppose him, even down to individual voters.

He may not have said those exact words, but use of the word 'traitor' is plenty clear enough to Venezuelans.

Only useful idiots like Sean Penn don't see this stuff for what it is-- or perhaps they do, and thus are not just stupid but actually true believers in leftism and all it represents, all the subjugation and fear and death and misery and poverty and starvation and yes, torture.

You know, forgetting the subsequent demonizing of the McCarthy hearings, there's a reason they happened in the first place; showbiz was actually riddled with leftists and communists.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

I would add that the Sudan is far from the only place in which slavery lives today....

Try Mauritius. Try Yemen. Try almost any Islamic country, if you slightly broaden the definition of slavery to include women in bondage.

Archbishop of leftism Rowan Williams sounds little different from Harry Reid or Michael Moore here, and any normal person (including a large number of democrat voters) can see he is wrong in his assertions about Iraq.

If you never understood before why we have the amendment prohibiting the establishment of a state church here in America, remember that the Church of England was the reason the founders wrote it.

Things don't always get progressively worse. It is good to read this summary of the steps toward improvement of this society on a number of levels, and what the author believes were contributing factors.

It'll almost revive your flagging faith in government and leadership, at least in the long term; short term, they look as mediocre and disappointing as ever, of course. :-)

Thursday, November 22, 2007

This is the kind of thing the Dems are planning to force on us in the next session, and which the president is prepared to veto.

JFK gave a speech in 1962, to a group of economists I believe, in which he explained his intentions regarding tax cuts, which in his view increase, not decrease, government revenue.

The tax cuts passed, government revenue increased, and JFK was proven right.

During the Reagan administration, government revenues TRIPLED because of Reagan's agenda of tax cuts.

During the Bush administration, each of the last few years has set a blockbuster new record of government revenues, all based on the Bush tax cuts.

When the tax burden decreases, more business is done; when making profits is penalized less, it is pursued more.

And more economic activity means more jobs, which means lower unemployment and increases in income across the spectrum.

Recently, Charlie Rangel (D. New York) claimed that if the Alternative Minimum Tax is to be dealt with, repealed or whatever, then that tax cut would need to be "paid for" by increases in other taxes.

Rangel has never been publicly challenged on this concept; he has never faced the fact that tax cuts are their own revenue generators, that they pay for themselves; nor has he admitted the opposite, that tax increases REDUCE government revenue by stifling the kind of economic activity which results in tax money flowing to government.

I will vote for whichever candidate brings this up, often and loudly. It is a basic, a staple of economics, that ought to be taught in schools and mentioned in public by every conservative and Republican.

Cut taxes and you increase government revenue; increase taxes and you decrease government revenue. History proves it time and time again.

IF Rangel and the Dems want more money to spend, they should simply cut more taxes.

Their plan to broaden and increase tax burdens on everyone proves they do not really want more revenue; they want more CONTROL, more power, over everything and everyone.

This is what you get when you vote Democrat. Reduced economic activity, increased unemployment, more burden on the taxpayer for unemployment and welfare, and a circular increase of taxes because of THAT.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Hugh Hewitt over at Townhall.com links to this Boston Globe story, a month old now but just appearing in the press....

And the blanket of silence was for good reason. It's about a well known former journalist (who is now a college professor) named Carole Simpson, who rose to the heights of TV journalism, anchoring at ABC and moderating a 1992 presidential debate.

And a few weeks ago, she stood up during a Democrat primary and shouted to get Hillary's attention. She then intoned, "now that I'm no longer a journalist I'm free to speak my mind" and endorsed Hillary for president.

Liberal journalists are obviously not free to speak their minds, not if they wish to maintain the pretense (and that is certainly what it is) of serving the public interest through unbiased presentation of facts.

They are free, however, to choose what stories to cover and what slant to use, and it is through these things that they do indeed speak their minds.

Simpson was so worried that she had fed the conservative beast red meat on the subject of liberal press bias, she actually offered to resign from Emerson College, where she teaches journalism.

They refused her resignation, of course. Can't let a good one go to waste.

Atlas links to this story today, an amazing look at the problems brought to modern society by Islamic culture.

Pakistanis give birth to a large number of children with recessive disorders, birth defects caused by intermarriage in families. Their average is almost ten times the British national average of 3.4%.

The story goes on to say estimates show that over half of Pakistani marriages are between first cousins.

Remember, Islam is big on family. Tribe is everything. While it is legal in many countries to marry one's cousin, it is generally not prudent. Offspring are not guaranteed to have defects, but the odds are much higher, and higher still in subsequent generations, I believe.

From 3% in the general British population (which includes the Pakistani population, don't forget) to 30% in the Pakistani-only survey. Ten times the national average.

A powerful argument against intermarriage. But not powerful enough to overcome Muslim traditions and biases.

I wonder if anyone is brave enough to undertake a research program on IQ.

Whatever researcher does it, his own IQ is subject to a high speed decrease; brain function diminishes greatly when your head is separated from your body.

The one thing you can be sure of is that CNN did not waste any of those spots on genuine 'random voters'.

The funniest part is when a female 'random voter' is identified by CNN as being a casino cashier; when Barack Obama thanks her for the question, he also thanks her for her work on behalf of culinary workers. She is in fact a member of the culinary workers' union, but how would he know that if these were 'random voters' selected at random with random questions?

Saturday, November 17, 2007

... just to remind ourselves of those with whom we are dealing... (did that come out right?)

... read the assemblage of data, and most interestingly the quotes at bottom, in this Wikipedia page on Mary O. McCarthy, late of the CIA and the pages of the New York Times (she is reputed to be an anonymous source who gave them the 'black sites' in eastern Europe in 2004).

She is one of those fools mentioned in the post below. They're like termites, nibbling away at the timber in the walls of America; when you see a few, rest assured there are many many more.

In that story, you have "Intelligence sources" (who could be Scheuer or McCarthy or even Plame herself) giving snarky comments about how awful CIA is --

"you have to be a saint before you come to CIA, then they train you to be a liar"... this from an 'intelligence source' who presumably is enjoying a nice career doing this very thing while righteously denouncing it beneath the protective canvas of anonymity.

Reminds me of that McCarthy woman at CIA who tried to get away with it, lied to keep her job and her access, claimed not to be a NYT leaker, then when caught she became a woman of principle and defended her espionage.

Have cake, eat it too, then fling it at Bush. Charming. These people are bolted down to the year 1968.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Powerline has a wonderful reminder today of just how the 'consensus' on the manmade catastrophic global warming theory is reached.

"Everyone just assumed..." that higher temperatures would lead to more high cloud cover, trapping heat and enhancing the warming effect.

Actual observations of actual warmer areas, over time, yields the opposite reality. Hotter weather makes fewer high clouds, and temperatures bleed off because infrared radiation can exit the atmosphere and carry the heat with it. It isn't reflected back by high clouds that aren't there.

Meanwhile, in a story in yesterday's Dallas Morning News, Al Gore has joined a venture capital firm famous for making billionaires of its members, Kleiner Perkins Canfield and Byers.

He plans to donate 100% of his 'salary' (but none of the proceeds of the far more lucrative stock options) to an environmental group called the Alliance for Climate Protection.

The article does mention, in passing, that it is HIS environmental group. It's a nonprofit, but even those pay salaries.

So he's donating his 'salary' to his OWN nonprofit group, which doubtless pays him a salary.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

This is no shocker. It shouldn't even be treated as if it was a new idea.

Hillary's campaign is salting the audience and making sure she gets softball questions from the public.

And of course it's been going on since the Clinton phenomenon began. Remember a year or so ago, when Bill was on with Chris Wallace of Fox News, and got questions he didn't like? His face went scarlet, his posture became aggressive and he leaned forward and poked Wallace a couple of times while responding. He was ANGRY, a temper for which he's infamous among people who actually know him.

What brought it on, of course, was a questioning forum in which he wasn't safe, wasn't protected by planning.

And she gets the same benefit, year in and year out.

What should be noted here is not the events themselves, but the fact that she can no longer get AWAY with it. Not only is it a big topic in the media, but even the people who were directed to ask certain questions are now going public with that fact and expressing doubts about Clinton's forthrightness and qualifications for the grandest of offices.

Twenty years ago this would have remained unknown to the public; there were no 'new media' to bring it out. But today's new media has encouraged even the old media to take risks they never took before, just to keep up. And the Clintons are now far from untouchable, as they've been in the past.

She isn't kidding. There is now a religious order, a fatwa, against kidding around.

Apparently any joking at all is something to be regretted, to ask forgiveness for, and of course joking ABOUT Islam can and should cost you your head in some cases.

I'm reminded of an obscure but wonderful Sean Connery movie, after the novel of the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, called "The Name of the Rose". Connery was a medieval monk/detective who was engaged to solve the mystery of murders in a monastery. The chief bad guy turned out to be the old blind librarian, a man who was so against joy and laughter that he poisoned those monks who happened upon the ancient books in their monastic library that dealt with humor. In the end the old man burned down the library; better this than that people should discover the power of humor to distract from God and to mock what should be kept serious.

This was, of course, treated by the producers as the ultimate evil of religion (Catholicism). It pressed joylessness upon us, prevented us from knowing the lighter matters of the human heart and revelling in them.

Now, of course, this has left the fictional screen of 1984 and become true. Only the religion is different.

And that, my friends, makes all the difference in the world. Hollywood will NOT make movies that decry the joylessness of Islam and the oppression of the human spirit under which Muslims labor.

Because it's not Christians doing the oppressing--

Because opposition to Islam might make Bush look good--

Because Hollywood is quite afraid of Islam, of what they will do if they don't like the movies.

Be aware, my muslim friend... if you would laugh, hide it in your robes, as coughing perhaps, or a sneeze attack. Women of Islam, be glad your faces are covered, so that the mullahs cannot see the smile on your face or the glint of joy in your eye.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

But a tinfoil-encased leftard moonbat (upon further examination he appears to be a middle-easterner) -- who sullied this blog with a 'comment'-- has brought to my attention a newspaper article, used on his blog as the prime evidence for the evils of Zionism. Don't follow his links, you'll only be frustrated and stunned by the total lack of working thought processes there. I"ve not found a way to link without sending you to the hell of his site, so just trust me on what it says.

In the moonbat view of the universe, in order to prove one's (predecided) point, one finds the documentation that proves one side committed atrocities against the other, and then the discussion is over-- the other is pure and good, the one side is evil and indefensible. That article provided the proof of the atrocities, and that was that. No context, no broader scope of time and circumstance. One list of atrocities, and it's time to deliver judgment.

This practice of too-fast judgments and too-shallow research is poor at best, but particularly when the recent history of the two sides is well documented, and one need only look to see who's doing what. In this case the "Zionists" are harshly judged for the excesses of a stressful and dangerous war of 1967, one which they did not start and which if they lost would have meant the end of, the death of, everything and everyone held dear in that soldier's nation. Stress? Uh, yeah.

While most Israeli soldiers served bravely, honorably and by the rules, a few did lose their bearings and become cruel in their treatment of their enemies. And unlike an Arab terrorist, many of those who did these things are haunted even today by their revived consciences, losing sleep, gaining depression, etc. The experiences have ruined families, broken hearts and lives, made failure of success...

My tinfoil-hatted acquaintance stops here, and the end of the list of Israeli atrocities, the work done, the lines practically writing themselves, and says literally that this (the content of the Haaretz article) is Zionism.

Shudder. Deep intake of breath. "The horrors!"

The story was in Haaretz, a powerful story of the separate lives of soldiers in the Six Day War, with details of the terrible things they did, the conscience that grew silent in them, the rage that became the controlling factor in daily decisions.... men shot for no reason, women beaten after attempts at attacking well armed soldiers, and general loss of concern for the victim Arabs as the final day wound to an end.

This is the list of wartime atrocities from 1967 that every American leftist wishes had been from Iraq 2004, because they're already so darn CERTAIN that our evil soldiers commit such atrocities every day before camp breakfast.

IN this burning fever to accomplish the tarring of the Israeli military, there's something juvenile; "YOU guys call yourselves GOOD, eh? Well, folks, read what they did here and here and then you'll know they're not so high and mighty GOOD as they pretend to be!" There is also the very real need to make the geopolitical job for any given country easier by not having to measure up to some moral standard, by not having to risk the public's perception that the 'bad guys' are needlessly attacking the 'good guys'.

The list is quite compelling. Even the soldiers on the side of good can become overly determined to deliver punishment to the bad side for all they've done, all the death and pain that their intransigence and aggression forced upon us. We didn't want to fight them, but by God if they are going to fight us, we will do what we must to win.

And even though it's really a short list of a handful of anecdotes, one can be confident there are more such stories. Something snaps in some soldiers under the stress not just of battle, but literally of defending your family and friends and homeland from total extinction, as the Jews did in 1967.

I do not defend the men who did these things. No war has ever come and gone without men doing such things, and often they were good men who later could not explain why, and were haunted by it. It happens, and it happens in all wars.

Over the past couple of years in Iraq, the world has feverishly attempted to saddle America and Bush with the acts of the handful of people in that stupid Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, who are now stateside serving prison time for what they did.

Can I point out that, in the history of war, this normally does NOT happen. Cruelties, atrocities, these happen in war, on all sides. But only the American military investigates, takes custody of the bad actors, puts them on trial, finds them guilty, and sends them to prison.

And remember that this article my tinfoiled friend directed me to read, the one that proved Zionism was an ideology of murder and madness? IT was written in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper which anyone who knows such things agrees is the leftist paper of record over there.

Read this for more. Haaretz is descibed as never having seen a Palestinian atrocity worthy of being mentioned in their paper. Subsidiary of the New York Times? We report, you decide....

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Take a gander at the first comment beneath this post, and see for yourself the level of intellect, love of reason and respect for the dignity of discourse which marks the pro-jihadi pro-Scheuer side of this discussion.

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Correct me if I'm wrong.

China, India, the far east in general, and Buddhism in particular, are not known for their irrational support of the Zionist state.

Nor are Buddhists, practitioners of the ultimate "religion of peace", known for militant or violent assaults on ANYTHING or ANYONE.

Could it be that radical Islam is a fierce and unrelenting ideology that is intent on subjugating the entire world, and that any religion at all (including no religion, agnosticism and atheism) other than Islam is unacceptable and a target?

From down here in Texas, that's how it looks to me. But then I didn't go to college in Manitoba, so I'm just not as worldly as Michael Scheuer.

Remember when John Kerry's campaign bus rolled up to a Wendy's restaurant one day in 2004, and the candidate graced the room with his presence?

A soldier (or was it two?) grimaced when he approached. His perfumed and coiffed wife looked at the menu, pointed at a picture of chili, and asked "what's dat?"

A man of the people, that JFK.

The ultimate phoniness of the whole adventure was revealed later, of course. A local five star country club had been engaged to create lunch for the entire bus, and it was waiting on board in paper bags. The Wendy's trip was a headfake; JFK never intended to eat there. He ordered a salad and picked at it.

This served as a reminder to me that rich elitists aren't part of the real world. They don't know what we know, can't function in our environment.

Friday, November 9, 2007

This pretty much sums up where former CIA superspy Michael Scheuer's heart is....

The nation-state of Israel is an intolerable burden to the treasury and security of the United States, and Washington's current relationship with Israel – sanctioned by the AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee)-funded political leaders of both parties – is one of several factors that are leading to full-scale American participation in other peoples' religious wars, religious wars that David Horowitz's recent "Islamofascist Awareness Week" manifestly wants to bring to the streets of the United States.

That's the final paragraph of an article he wrote this week and posted on antiwar dot com (can't make myself link it here, google it if you must).

A couple of thoughts--

1) There is ample evidence in the form of Osama's prior comments that he is not, specifically, all that interested in our support of Israel. He believes that we are evil, not because of that, but because of our decadence and godlessness, and that we must be destroyed or subjugated. At least Scheuer calls our relationship with Israel "one of several factors" and not THE cause, but still he ignores what Osama has already said is the prime cause.

2) It is entirely possible (I cannot know for sure, from my vantage point as an ordinary guy in Texas) that our relationship with Israel has PREVENTED not only attacks on the USA, but perhaps even a full scale war or two. Scheuer does not offer even the slightest possibility of a mitigation here, a mixed blessing, through that relationship. And history shows, I think, that it has been at least that.

And what with the recent destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility (a facility that Scheuer doubtless will explain away, one way or the other), the positive contributions of this mixed blessing could be said to be continuing up 'til this very day, and perhaps will be made manifest even more clearly in the coming adventures with Iran. Just because Israel might act to protect itself does not mean the US does not benefit from the act.

3) Mr. Scheuer positively VIBRATES with his dislike of the whole notion of the Jewish state, and it blinds him to the truth; these are not 'other peoples' religious wars', as he puts it, but war made on US, against US, with dozens of attacks on US down through the past decades, and loud and forthright declarations that the war is against US.

Perhaps if there had never been a modern Israel, the Muslim fundamentalists would have been inflamed by something else; perhaps not. But it is possible, and if it had happened, who would Scheuer and his kind blame?

The Islamists say its a war of God against godlessness. They intend to subjugate the entire world under their culture, their religion. They've dreamed about this for hundreds of years, planned it for almost that long. They have long term goals and are not afraid to spend generations of their young people in the doing. Jews were a dying people, a shadow, completely irrelevant, when the Islamist fever began to burn. As far back as the 1880's, local Indonesian muslims were sending their imams to Saudi Arabia to study Wahabism; believe it or not, they feared that Allah was angry with them over their laxity of observance, and that the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 was a manifestation of that anger. Saudi traveling preachers were in Indonesia, and began to encourage the pilgrimage; the rest is history.

The first 'attacks on the west by Islamic radicals' were in the form of a couple of public murders in Dutch towns in Indonesia in 1886, wherein turbaned muslims rushed into shops shouting 'Allah hu akbar' and killed the first white people they found. Such attacks have been steady, if not constant, since.

It almost seems to me, after a quick scan of history, that Israel is a tangent, a sort of inflamed pustule on the thigh of the strider who steadily walks forward, toward the light of worldwide sharia. He'll lance the boil in due time, but first he must endure it on the ground that larger goals require his full attention.

(The above paragraph illustrates why I've never seriously tried to become a writer. Ugh.)

Sure, the Muslims are mad about Israel, which they call "the catastrophe", but are they not on the course they'd have followed anyway?

Thanks again to the senior editor at Commentary Magazine, Gabriel Schoenfeld, for working so hard on puncturing the Michael Scheuer gasbag....

Here's a short and sweet assessment of today's crime wave-- fake hate crimes, wherein the 'victim' is usually the one who actually did it. Swastikas on school doors, nooses, racial slogans, it seems that everywhere in this country are people so determined to prove that old-fashioned KKK style hatred is worse than ever, they'll happily fake it themselves just to 'draw attention to the issue'.

CREATE the issue is more like it. Even the Jena nooses had nothing to do with race, but with recreating a scene from a western movie.

Almost all these hoaxes happen on college campii. this says an awful lot about decency, morality and honesty-- they are AWOL in most institutions of higher learning, including in the offices of tenured professors.

As Anne Coulter said recently, it isn't racism but racial hoaxism that is endemic to this nation; I wonder if anyone will bother to protest THAT.

Here's a very interesting story in Breitbart.com today, about the crop of "Iraq war" films and their miserable box office takings. It's linked to today's Drudge Report.

It's interesting in that every excuse in the book is proffered here, save one; the movies express a political viewpoint opposite to that held by the vast majority of their audiences.

To date, there is not ONE SINGLE pro-soldier pro-freedom movie to come out of this conflict. They're all political screeds targeted at Bush. In a way, I appreciate these films; the producers have done us all the favor of providing a metric for anti-war 'support', and the numbers are dismal. Those people are loud, but they are decidely NOT a majority.

Like Homer Simpson said in the Simpsons movie (this paraphrase keeps coming in handy for some reason), only suckers pay to see something in the theatres that they can see on TV for free.

If you believe in the law of unintended consequences, as I do, this will not surprise you.

The western appetite for biofuels is causing starvation around the world, as farmers switch crops to more profitable biofuel materials and regular food supply crops are neglected.

What is the 'western appetite for biofuels'?

Liberalism, that's what it is. Leftism. "Progressiveness". Biofuels are at present not only more expensive per energy unit than oil-based conventional fuels, they are also at least as destructive to the environment if not more so. (I've written on this before, so I'm not going to bother searching for that link at this moment.)

And now the poor, the losers of life's lottery, the weak, the needy, are hungrier than ever, because liberals can't stand the oil industry's profitability. Their zeal for redistribution of wealth has exacerbated exactly the kind of poverty they claim to oppose.

But the most ironic part is the source website of this linked article; CommonDreams.org, the source for breaking news and views from the PROGRESSIVE COMMUNITY.

I guess they'd know about the biofoolish business; it's their business.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

So the old zombie of Christian conservative politics staggers up from the grave again, to inflict its viewpoint on the great confused....

Pat Robertson has endorsed Rudy, calling him the best man for the job, etc.

But for this to mean something, Pat would have had to specifically outline the complaints that were bound to be generated (as in, this man is NOT pro life, other candidates are, that's important to Christian voters, why do you endorse Rudy with this hanging over him?).

Robertson is, in my view, too addled to even contemplate such a task.

He's just trying to stay in the spotlight, long past his time.

When they're Dems, why these people are statesmen whose experience benefits the party.

And when they're repubs, why they are elderly and forgetful and the nation shouldn't be held hostage by men who are no longer capable of doing the job of lawmaker or opinion leader.....

When they're Christian conservatives, respect for the past makes fools in the present, apparently. Robertson is now out of his league and needs to retire.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

You'll recall Scheuer wrote a book called "Imperial Hubris", one of a long line of anti-Bush anti-war screeds that decorated the worst-seller lists and TV talk shows during the summer of 2004. You know the routine-- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill got it going with an anti-Bush book in the spring, Kitty Kelley writes a Bush family expose, Michael Moore releases Fahrenheit 9/11, Bob Woodward writes one of those White House insider books, etc etc etc, all designed to create a media buzz of anti-Bush sentiment right before the presidential election.

Didn't work, of course, as Bush was re-elected by several million votes.

But Scheuer caught my eye at the time, because CIA usually prevents its retirees from disclosing all sorts of information about what they did and what they know. In this case, it was almost as if the CIA commissioned Scheuer to write his anti-Bush screed.

And he was willing, if somewhat less than able. And in the end it made nary a ripple in the pond of public opinion.

Scheuer, apparently, is stark babbling gonzo full-tilt nuts. Schoenfeld has been investigating his history and publishing it on his Commentary Magazine blog, and I happened to make a comment on that blog.

It was not about what Schoenfeld had written there, but about what Scheuer himself had written in the comments section. He's tightly wound, folks... one one occasion he posted THREE comments within a few minutes in response to something Schoenfeld had said. Dude is vibrating like the high E string on my Strat.

My comment was a bit common sense, a bit psychoanalysis, and it might be coincidental that Scheuer stopped writing there after I had left my bit... but it might not. :-)

At any rate, Mr. Schoenfeld, the senior editor of CM, wrote me to congratulate me on having nailed the Scheuer personality disorder, and now he has posted my text as a part of his latest addition to the "Connecting the Dots" series on Scheuer. It's number nine in the series, and Powerline has linked to it. I'm "Dave in Texas", as Mr. Schoenfeld pastes me.

Powerline has many thousands of readers.

This blog has none I'm aware of. :-)

I'm being read by actual readers! Let's hear it for ME!!! heh heh...

I sent a link to my wife, and she responded by pointing out that in my comment I failed to put an apostrophe in the word "it's".

UPDATE-- in the 'comments' section of the Powerline post I linked, someone mentions that Scheuer is Ron Paul's foreign policy guy, and they've done at least one presser together.

The nut, it seems, doesn't fall far from the other nuts. It's all Israel's fault, and Bush's fault for mindlessly supporting Israel. Jews are manipulating world events. They're making fools of us all. Darn Neocons. Jew spies are all around us.

UPDATE II-- I was just reminded that Scheuer is on a unique and very short list of authors, along with the risible Noam Chomsky.

The two were recently recommended reading from none other than Osama bin Laden.

"If you want to understand what's going on and if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing the war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer." Thus saith Osama.

Yep... they can't afford to pick up their own garbage, they don't pay for electricity... their people are almost starving.... but they think the most important thing to do with the money they have is to expand their ability to make MOVIES.

Pallywood, anyone? We've been watching their productions for decades, of course; they've been presented to us as news videos of events on the ground.

As Homer Simpson said in the Simpsons movie, we're suckers if we pay to see it in the theatres-- it's on TV for FREE!

Among many interesting and promising things he said was one brief chiding remark; Sarkozy says America does not need a weak dollar to compete on the world markets.

Irritation? You bet. A weak dollar makes all our prices, all our goods, much cheaper when bought overseas, and cheaper still against European products. The Euro is at present very strong, not just in comparison to the dollar but in general.

Folks, a weak dollar is not a 'result of anti-Americanism abroad' or 'a sign of a poor American economy' or anything of that nature. It is a choice, a monetary policy. To weaken a currency, you print more. That dilutes the value.

Bush has been using a weak dollar to strengthen America's economy for years, and it's worked. France, obviously, has been suffering because of this. Their products are much more expensive on the world market than ours.

It's been a great way of punishing France, and other major countries, for being so maddeningly anti-American, so pointlessly obstructive. Now Sarkozy comes, friendship and partnership in every speech to us, and points out with mildness that we don't need to punish them anymore. They're on our side.

Message received. Bush won't subordinate our economic needs to this, but there may well be a strengthening of the dollar over time, a signal to European allies that the 'war' is over.

But with oil prices rocketing upwards, perhaps this won't happen immediately. The economy so far has managed to absorb the hit, but nobody really knows how high it will go.

These days, when we hear of a horrible terrible very bad hate crime, whether it's anti-gay or anti-minority or whatever, the media goes into a frenzy and the country takes a breath and asks itself whether it's come as far as it thought it had...

It's a hate crime by liberals, wherein they try to 'prove' America is an ugly racist country, by FAKING acts of racism! They hate conservatives so much, they are willing to lie and cheat and forge to 'prove' conservatives are evil.

The latest is the swastikas on the doors in the major university.

Faked by a liberal student. NO NAZIS THERE. No racists there. Nothing to see here, please return to your homes.

Remember, the nooses at Jena were a prank by white students against other white students, to remind them of a scene from Lonesome Dove. They had NO IDEA that nooses were racist reminders of bad times gone by. The bad times are long ago, and today's kids just don't know anything about them-- AS IT SHOULD BE. As it is.

Until the media comes along.

Anytime a 'hate crime' is committed on a college campus these days, it always seems the actual guilty party is either a college professor or a college student, trying to make it SEEM like conservatives did it.

They are the real haters, folks. Liberals are so intent on being on the moral high ground, they'll fake and lie and cheat to make the other side look bad.... just so they can wag their fingers from on high...

Last summer, I think it was, I went to get a haircut in Houston and found myself alone in the shop with the hairdresser, who was a middle aged Iranian woman. I asked lots of questions and she seemed happy to talk about her life and her immigration to the States.

I was quite pleased that this had happened. I always like to visit with people whose lives are part and parcel of what makes the news, so that I can get the truth I don't get from TV.

Today it happened again. This time in Irving, Texas.

I sat down, the nice lady came to put the cloth on me, and I discerned from her nametag and her looks that she was Iranian.

And once more, she was quite pleased that an American was able to recognize her nationality.

She told me of her uncle, who had his satellite dish and his DVD player confiscated by the secret police... his store was raided and most of his merchandise taken.... he was imprisoned for several days, beaten, and fined several thousand dollars.

Nobody ever said what crime he had committed.

She told me people live in fear of those secret police and routinely inform on each other to get on the good side of the cops. It is apparently almost entirely based on who you are, where you live, etc.

She said there are some very wealthy people in Iran who continue to grow wealthier, but overall the economy is in a shambles, nobody has any money and it's impossible to get ahead.

When I mentioned Ahmedinejad's pronouncement that there are no gays in Iran, she bellowed with laughter.

All in all, she gave a mixed report. It is perhaps not as horrible as some dictatorships, and yet would any of us here endure such a life?

She even joked about her marriage, saying that she had been married 14 years but would not have made it that long had she still lived in Iran... because Islam teaches men that they have more rights over women than they actually DO, she said, smiling but not with her eyes.

She said the men enjoyed hearing that part of Islam, probably too much.

Her own husband never took to heart the instructions on how to beat your wife.... but many, she said, do... and the women cannot get jobs, cannot get credit for shopping, cannot be taken seriously in public, and must stay married because there are no other options.

Polygamy is not uncommon, she says, because women alone are supposed to be cared for; apparently in their version of Islam it is necessary for a woman to be married in order to be cared for, even if her husband already had a wife. Polygamy as charity.

In Iran, if I were to take a second wife, it would be considered big of me.

Friday, November 2, 2007

UPDATE: again, no link (I'm so sloppy), but AP is reporting that N.Y. Democrat Senator Chuck Schemer has said he will vote in favor of Mukasey's nomination going to the Senate floor, and under this circumstance Mukasey will probably be confirmed.

Schemer was really hamstrung here, having spoken for Mukasey and assured Bush that this nomination would have no problems. He was pretty much high and dry, his fellow Dems having gone moonbat over waterboarding. Always enjoyable to see the leftist leadership twisting in the wind because of excess leftist influence in the party.

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Today it's in the news. Leaky Leahy is going to vote against Mukasey's nomination coming out of committee.

Well, it's HIS committee, and this means the nomination probably won't come out, period, and our Justice Department will continue limping along without a leader.

Remember, President Bush decided NOT to nominate Ted Olson, because Schumer and other Dems told him they'd put up a big long fight over it. He picked Mukasey instead, because Schumer liked him and supported him.

End result of changing your nominee to get along with Democrats and avoid a fight?

A fight.

When will our side ever learn that they are simply not acting out of goodwill and they will not go along with you, even if you move their way and do what they ask?

The whole thing is over waterboarding. Specifically, the Dems want Mukasey to admit that waterboarding is torture, so they can be prepared to make moves in the future to have it banned.

Put a man under water and push a board down on top of him, to make him believe he will drown. That's waterboarding.

Our own soldiers and intelligence agents go through it for training purposes. Does the Dem insistence on torture mean that our trainers are torturing our own agents and soldiers?

Uh, no. That's just stupid.

Waterboarding does no permanent harm, inflicts no bodily damage, and causes no pain. No thumbnails are pulled out, no sexual organs are sliced off, no hot pokers are inserted into eyeballs, no electrical wires deliver high voltage to testicles, and no mutilation permanently scars the victims of the evil waterboarding.

IT IS NOT TORTURE.

It is aggressive interrogation. And it works. Countless lives have been saved because Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded, gave in to his fear, and told our guys everything.

Dems want to take away all options, to make it impossible for our guys to carry out an effective interrogation. I can only speculate on why they have set themselves this way, and that is for another post, but one thing is certain; they cannot be trusted to be in charge of the security of this country.

I've carelessly lost the links to this, but it's everywhere, and I'm sure industrious readers (are either of you industrious?) will find it.

Hillary's thesis at Wellesley, written at age 21, was inaccessible throughout the Clinton presidency at her request. And I grant that a 21 year old Hillary, like many of us at that age, probably wasn't the wisest or most rational person in the world.

Nonetheless much of what she is can, apparently, be seen in that document, as well as much that is true but that she apparently rejects today.

I've found one quote that bears a look, a comment about public welfare and its downside:

“A cycle of dependency has been created,” she wrote, “which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy.”

In this she is dead right. And it is the conservative's lament today, that what well could be good and hardworking and capable people are never given the chance to learn just how much they could achieve, because from childhood they are locked in the degrading cycle of accepting public money to get by.

It's just one of the many good reasons to look at poverty through the lens of a vibrant economy rather than a government program. The more active and productive America is, the more jobs are created and the more opportunity exists for people to become self-reliant.

Conversely, the more government programs and taxes there are, the less vibrant the economy will be, and the fewer poor people will ever have the chance to know just what they can do. "Resignation and apathy", in Hillary's own words, are their fate.

Too bad that these days Hillary decries the conservative view she proposed in that paper. Today she claims the people who don't believe in government programs are evil, and want those poor people to remain in misery.

But as she wrote so long ago, it is socialism that distributes misery, not capitalism.

But I was this time. I suspected in a post down below that Dog Chapman's son Tucker was the one who publicized the telephone call recording that has engineered the downfall of the Dog empire. Sadly, it's true.

Recall, Chapman was attempting to draw the line with Tucker over his girlfriend. He didn't trust her and didn't like her, and felt his family and his media empire was at risk because of her.

Almost everyone in media, every black public figure with an axe to grind, almost everyone in GENERAL has decided Chapman is a dreadful ugly racist who should be punished.

Remember the context, the actual words of the call, I beg you. Not because I'm defending him over the use of the word-- he should have stopped talking like that 20 years ago, for obvious reasons-- but because Chapman himself explained in the call that he doesn't mean by that word that all black people are inferior, or that he hates them, or that he is a racist.

He didn't say these things clearly or well; he was under immense emotional pressure, trying to draw a line between himself and his son for now and the future. It was difficult, and the words did not come easily to him.

Contextually, though, he was saying "Tucker, I don't dislike her because she's black. She could be any race or color and I would feel the same. I don't trust her not to be an opportunist, to run to the media with stories about how we talk in this house. We don't mean anything by it, but America wouldn't understand. I don't want to risk everything I've worked for, and you should think about your family here and what everyone has to lose. I don't want her in this house. Either break up with her or get a job somewhere else, and I'll help you do that."

So, influenced by a young woman raised in the Sharpton/Jackson generation, young Tucker did what dad thought impossible. He betrayed his family and his father.

This episode does not make Dog evil, and it certainly does not make Tucker the good guy. Doubtless he enjoyed and participated in all the household conversations in which that N word was used, and for other reasons had only recently developed a distaste for it.

Still, the right thing to do would have been to move along to the other job Dog would have helped him find, and encourage his father and family to change their ways, for the right reasons. Had Tucker done this, I could have respected him and given him public credit for being a good person and for encouraging his dad to be better.

What Tucker did instead makes me sick and heartbroken. He is young and unwise, and probably believes at present that he has done the right thing, but that won't last long. I repeat, Dog should have changed his habits decades ago, and was certainly aware of the risks in more recent times. But he was an authentic guy, an honest man, and it was hard for him to really believe that just being who he was in his own private time was so wrong as to require wholesale change.

And perhaps he was right to be confident in his own goodness, but that word was always going to bring him down.

Dog's a bad man who became a good man. Tucker has wrecked everything Dog built, and put an end to the good influence Dog was bringing to the world.